So work is pushing me to Office 365; it wouldn’t surprise me if the next home system does so too. I have decided to see if W7 and a more modern hardware makes OWA easier to use. I have had to upgrade my phone since my current one was very old, and they didn’t want to support BB6. Microsoft have also bought Yammer and Skype recently and launched Lync as part of the desktop; so everyone needs a clear road map. I shall start with the view that I should use Lync for chat and Yammer for micro-blogging inside the company. Obviously, outside the company I shall continue to use what people read/reply to. An interesting insight, inside a company managers can declare use policies that have a chance of sticking, but it’s not guarenteed.

So can pidgin act as a Lync chat client? Here’s the google search, here’s the pidgin plugins home page., it seems SIPE is the keyword, and the pidgin page says it’ll support TRM as well as implying it’ll support Lync although it seems designed for MS Office Communicator.

So, here’s the SIPE code, http://sourceforge.net/projects/sipe/, it’s an NSIS install on Windows, think I had to reboot windows to see the “Office Communicator” option. The configuration runes are documented on this page, which is part of the O365 community site. DFL 9th Oct 2014